London History

From its origins in Chartism, to eco protests today - a history of London anarchism. A fascinating talk in prospect at the Bishopsgate Insitute on 8 April 2008, given by Martyn Everett.

Stop the City! The Anarchists in London is a lecture at the Bishopsgate Institute on 8 April, 2008. From Chartism on, a fascinating look at how Londoners have ever been a turbulent and rabble rousing breed.

Tower Hamlets has its share of blue plaques, though not as many as some of us would like. That imbalance will be redressed slightly next week, when a plaque to Thomas Fowell Buxton is unveiled at the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.

It’s unusual to find memorials for father and daughter though - and facing each other on opposite sides of the street. In Vallance Road, Bethnal Green (better known for another family operation with less lofty aims) you’ll find Hughes Mansions, remembering Thomas Hughes. Right across the street is a blue plaque to Mary Hughes, his daughter - and mementoes to Mary are found scattered around the borough.

Thomas Hughes was one of that English band of muscular middle class reformers that seemed to thrive in Victorian England. A QC, judge, MP and author, he had been a star of the cricket team at Rugby School under the famous headship of Dr Thomas Arnold (a friend of his father’s from Oxford) whose religious and reforming zeal left a lasting mark on the young man.

Hughes was born in 1822. Though he left school before the sixth form (his final act being a school cricket match at Lord’s Cricket Ground), he went up to Oriel College, Oxford, was called to the bar in 1845, became an MP for the emerging Liberal Party in 1865 and was made a county court judge in 1882. We know him best today for his then-shocking novel ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. He also wrote a number of non-fiction works, with meditations on faith including ‘Religio Laici’ and ‘A Layman’s Faith’. Perhaps his most remarkable venture though was the settlement he founded in America. Rugby, Tennessee was ‘an experiment in utopian living for second sons of the English gentry’. It wasn’t a success.

Mary Hughes, meanwhile, was less concerned with the slightly distressed sons of the gentry, and much more with the appalling lot of the East End working classes. Mary, born in 1860 had the social concern typical of many Victorian daughters of the gentry. She would drive to do her work in a comfortable carriage and be driven home afterwards. But something deeper was stirring within her - a sense that her privileges were deeply unfair and that the whole class system was wrong.

It wasn’t an idea guaranteed to endear her to her contemporaries, but Mary went further. She became more immersed in the ideas of the Christian Socialists and of Quakerism (of which more again next week). She decided to live with the East End poor and to become one of them. In 1895 she moved in with her sister and brother-in-law, the curate of St Jude’s in Whitechapel. By the time she moved on in 1915, to Kingsley Hall in Bow, she had become a ’shabby and sometimes verminous woman’, totally committed to helping those around her. During her time there, she met Gandhi during his sojourn in London.

Soon she had become a Quaker herself, though still attending Anglican services (a so-called ‘Quanglican’). She put her ideas into practice with the Dew Drop Inn, opened in 1826 in a former pub at 71 Vallance Road. The name was a pun, inviting anyone passing and in need to drop in. Quaker architect Malcolm Sparks did the conversion work, and S Grylls Wilson (an Anglican architect, thus neatly completing the set) did further work in 1928, looking after the building for the rest of Mary’s life.

And it was a long one. Mary had undertaken her grand and humble mission at the age of 66, yet her energy was a legend. ‘At the end of a long day, if the rest of the hostel was full, the old lady would push papers and old clothes aside and sleep in a bed chair,’ wrote one contemporary observer. The Inn had rooms for ‘lodgers’ (some people came and never went), Christian Socialist religious services, rooms for the study of sociology (the local poor made good research material), and for trade union meetings.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the eccentric and hardline Mary had little truck with the compromises her Labour Party had to make as a (now major) political force. George Lansbury commented that ‘Our frail humanity only produces a Mary Hughes once in a century.’ The defeat of the General Strike in 1926 and Ramsey MacDonald’s money saving cuts in the dole in 1931 loosened the ties further.

Mary died, aged 81 in 1941. German bombs were falling on a London she had first seen in a Victorian era of horse and cart rather than powered flight. Four years later, the last V2 rocket attack on the capital would hit Hughes Mansion, that memorial to her father, killing 133 people. Mary’s name is also remembered in the Mary Hughes Building at 22 Underwood Road (off Vallance Road), an ante-natal clinic and later centre run by Tower Hamlets Council. Mary Hughes

It’s a windy Sunday morning in August 1878. Off the coast of Portsmouth lies the British Fleet, waiting to be reviewed by the Queen. The band is playing the jolly musical number from HMS Pinafore, satirising the ‘ruler of the Queen’s Navee’ when suddenly, from the east, two vessels, quite like any other the crews of the battleships have seen, come speeding toward the fleet at unusual speed.

A cheer goes up from the crews, recognising the daring of the voyage the little craft have taken from the Thames to the Solent - a journey that many feared would split the lightweight vessels in two. They are the first torpedo boats to navigate in open waters, and onboard are their builder, Alfred Yarrow and his wife - the pair have refused to expose their crews to dangers they wouldn’t themselves face.

At 38, Alfred Fernandez Yarrow had already come a long way from a humble Stepney childhood. By the time he died, aged 90, in 1932, he was Sir Alfred, the first Baronet of Homestead, and had seen Yarrow and Co become one of the world’s great shipbuilders.

Alfred was born in Stepney, the son of a Jewish mother and nonconformist Protestant father. His first schoolmaster astutely noted a ‘talent for engineering’, and Alfred won a scholarship to University College School.

At 15, he moved across the river to Greenwich, to begin an apprenticeship with Messrs Ravenill Salkeld, Marine Engineers. The hours were long and hard, but when the working day ended, Alfred remained in the workshop, studying and working on his own designs. He befriended another boy, James Hilditch, and together they developed a number of original inventions and took out several patents. Among them was a plough, put into production by Coleman and Sons, of Chelmsford. The young Yarrow soon became a London rep for the company.

They were an extraordinary pair, installing the first overhead telegraph line in London between their two homes, and developing a steam traction engine, put into production by Greenwich firm TW Cowan. They even set up their own Civil and Mechanical Engineers Society, with some 30 members, and Yarrow as the first vice president. When Hilditch left to join his father in the north of England, Yarrow decided to set up in business. He was just 23 when he opened his first yard, Yarrow and Hedley (a partnership) at Folly Wall on the Isle of Dogs. After a shaky start, the two became successful building steam river launches. Some 150 vessels were built between 1869 and 1875 including the boat used by Henry Morton Stanley to search the Congo for David Livingstone.

By the 1870s the firm had moved into building military vessels, designing torpedo boats first for the Argentine and Japanese navies, and then for the British Navy. Alfred dissolved the partnership with Hedley and the firm became Yarrow and Co. Yarrow was an entrepreneur and salesman as well as a brilliant engineer, and the dramatic meeting with the fleet in Portsmouth that day was a most effective way to end the furious and often acrimonious debate in Parliament over the worth of the boats. The masters of Her Majesty’s Navy were notoriously slow to accept innovation, so Yarrow took his design straight to Her Majesty.

Later that day, Victoria sent a message to Yarrow, via the Admiral of the Fleet, that nothing in the Review had impressed her so much as these new craft. With a suitable sense of theatre, Alfred and his crews had escorted the Queen from Cowes to Portsmouth, one boat on either side of the Royal Yacht. A few days later, the future King Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, made a trip in one of the boats alongside Alfred. He loved the speed of the boats, and their future was assured. The boats, designed to ram enemy vessels with a torpedo on a stake, and escape under cover of the explosion, became a feature of HM Navy. As a young naval officer, Prince George (the future George V and the son of Edward VII), would command one of the craft.

Technology moved on though, and Yarrow was ever alert to the changes. In 1892 he called on Admiral Sir John Fisher at the Admiralty and told him of the new, super-fast ‘torpedo boats’ which were being built for foreign navies. Yarrow was commissioned to come up with his own - not difficult as the Yarrow yard had already built the Kotaka, for the Japanese Navy, effectively the world’s first ‘torpedo boat destroyer’. The result was the HMS Havock and the HMS Hornet, delivered in 1893. At 180ft long and speeding at 27 knots, they were the Royal Navy’s first destroyers, delivering torpedoes but much larger and more seaworthy than the earlier torpedo boats.

In 1898, Yarrows moved out of the Folly Yard to London Yard, but in 1906 followed the rest of the London shipbuilding business out of the Thames. By 1916, he was Sir Alfred, and developed at taste for philanthropy, contributing toward a convalescent home for children on the Isle of Dogs, and towards medical research at Whitechapel’s Royal London Hospital, among numerous other causes.

Alfred Yarrow died in 1932 at age 90, with the company in good health. It would go on to be swallowed by GEC in 1974, and eventually by BAe Systems Marine.

Loads of interesting things going on during London’s East festival which runs from 1 to 6 March. Many of the activities centre on the Museum of London and http://www.museumindocklands.org.uk/English/. Pencil in Friday 2 March, when the Museum is running ‘East End Shorts’ a series of movies showcasing the East End and the lives of its inhabitants. A fascinating collection from the fifties, sixties and seventies, they are a mix of documentary, semi-documentary and (in the case of Bronco Bullfrog, fiction played by local people rather than professional actors.

Other highlights include Vanishing Street, which explores the life of a typical Jewish community in 1960s Britain. Shot by Robert Vas in 1961 in and around Hessel St in the East End, it shows us its street market, kosher food shops, newspaper and synagogue … just as the bulldozers move in. The film will be introduced by BFI film historian Ian O’Sullivan. Bronco Bullfrog and all the films in East End Shorts will feature in London Calling, a collection of 100 films and television programmes about the capital, available to view free of charge in the new BFI Mediatheque (opening 14 March). Further details at www.bfi.org.uk.